10 Ways a Facebook Fan Page Helps Your Business

By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur.com|December 28, 2009

Facebook is a social network, not a shopping network, so why should any business spend resources establishing and maintaining a Fan Page on Facebook? (A Fan Page, by the way, is a profile for a business or organization rather than for an individual.) Because even if members have no intention of buying anything on Facebook, the relationships you establish and community you build there can benefit your business in countless ways. Here, I reveal the top 10 ways a Facebook Fan Page can help your business.

Establishes another outpost for your business on the web
Creating a Fan Page provides your business and brands with another branding outpost on the Web where prospects, customers, future employees, vendors, and even the media can find information about your company and the products and services you offer. Unlike Facebook’s personal Profiles, which are member-only accessible, Facebook Fan Pages are public-facing by default; that is, people need not be logged into Facebook to view a business’s or brand’s Fan Page, so even more people have access to the information you post.

Tip: To save time updating your Fan Page, create an RSS feed on the Page’s Notes tab to pull entries from your existing business blog. As long as your blog posts aren’t overtly “salesy,” the additional content should be well received.

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Drives Traffic to Your Website
Fan Pages have no restrictions on driving Facebook traffic to websites. In fact, Facebook encourages you to link to your website from your business’s Fan Page. Redirecting even a small portion of Facebook’s huge amount of daily traffic to your website could significantly improve the amount of qualified traffic on your site.

Tip: Turn Facebook members into Fans, Fans into customers, and customers into Fans by cross-promoting your Fan Page and website. Link your Fan Page to your website and insert a Facebook widget on your site to link back to your Fan Page.

Improves your SEO
Google, through its new Social Search feature, and other search and decision engines are now indexing content created on sites like Facebook, so your Fan Page content has the potential to generate favorable search engine results for your business and brand. By linking your Fan Page to your website, you can leverage Social Search to drive even more Facebook traffic back to your site.

Allows you to engage with your community easily and for free
A Facebook Fan Page provides an inexpensive (free) alternative to implementing customer engagement on your own site. In minutes, you can have a branded Fan Page where customers and other brand advocates can post to your Facebook Wall, share photos and video, ask and answer questions, and interact with you and one another. Creating and managing a Fan Page, complete with a Discussions tab, is easier than launching and monitoring discussion forums or message boards on your own domain.

Connects you and your staff directly to your customers and fans
A Facebook Fan Page gives you a direct pipeline to your Fans. You can send messages to Fans all at once or target individuals or groups by country, state, city, gender, and even age range. Using the Events App, you can even…